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2010 Toronto Int'l Film Festival Unveils New Properties
- Details
- Parent Category: Film Festivals
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 20 September 2010 09:48
- Written by David D'Arcy
For a longstanding festival like Toronto’s, it was a brave beginning. TIFF 2010 was the debut of the Toronto International Film Festival in its new home, the TIFF Bell Lightbox. A silvery modernist box of cinemas, galleries and offices, it stands a few blocks away from one of the Festival's gala venues, the Roy Thomson Hall, a quirky 1980’s structure inspired by Japanese and Native American architecture.
This new building feels institutional already, which means you won’t find too many intentional quirks. Opening a public venue with a 42-floor condo tower on September 11 -- to attract donors, no less (the public swarmed in on September 12) -- is nothing if not a gesture of confidence. Within a few days, the adjustment was smooth. Film-goers came there for the movies. The restaurants and bars and the hotels were full, and TIFF had five more permanent theaters.
Bruce Kuwabara of KPMB Architects (National School of Ballet, Gardiner Museum, Canadian Embassy in Berlin) was the lead designer on the project. There’s not a lot of metaphor in his neo-modernist scheme, although the building corridors do resemble horizontal shafts of light projected through a central space. The cinema interiors are pretty close to perfect.
Docs by Werner Herzog and Alex Gibney that I saw there looked as good as they ever will. Filmmakers should be happy about that.
So should the general film-going tourist.
In late November, the Lightbox hosts the Tim Burton exhibition that drew 800 thousand visitors to the Museum of Modern Art in New York between November 2009 and April 2010.
It promises to be the most marketable exhibition in Toronto since the Art Gallery of Ontario showed a selection of works from the Barnes Foundation in 1994. (For an official report on the exploitation of the Barnes show, see http://www.cassies.ca/caselibrary/winners/AGO-BarnesExh.pdf. It will help you understand some of the institutional impulses behind the Barnes takeover detailed in The Art of the Steal.)
If there’s a gestural flourish here, it's an outdoor terrace that rises like an amphitheater 100 feet above King Street. It’s inspired by the Casa Malaparte on the island of Capri, conceived in 1937 by the Italian neo-rationalist architect Adalberto Libera and built (with the help of a local mason) by Curzio Malaparte, the journalist who wrote Kaputt. You’ve seen the Casa Malaparte before, in Contempt by Jean Luc Godard.
If you’re looking for other film roots at the Lightbox, there’s the Reitman family (the parents of Ivan), who lived through the Holocaust and finally made it to Canada. They opened up a cleaner’s, which eventually earned them the money to invest in real estate. Among other things, they bought a car wash that operated on the Lightbox’s site. A documentary about the Reitmans’ miraculous journey through hell showed on September 11 at a special gathering. Let’s hope that poignant film shows again. The Reitmans and the building’s developers donated the land, which was valued at $22 million.
What sets the interiors apart isn't a matter of flourishes or ornamentation, but that the Bell Lightbox steps beyond institutional austerity. Visiting the offices of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) a few blocks away, you set your watch back thirty years into secular Calvinism with narrow hallways and a grayish feel which seem to say that you must suffer or sacrifice to make films, and that comfort is a sin. Monkish well-meaning folk staff the place.
It’s been all to the good for decades, and will probably continue to be. But at the Lightbox, visitors can stretch out and breathe. If you’ve been watching films in Toronto for years, you feel as if you’ve finally left purgatory.
You haven’t reached paradise, though. For all the architectural improvements in the Lighbox over the film-going experiences that preceded it, the urbanism can make you uneasy. King Street in Toronto seems to be turning into a dense entertainment mall, above which the rich observe
it all from condo heaven. Look at any Toronto neighborhood where there is a new cultural building (supported by tax dollars), and commercial developers are reaping the benefits, with buildings that resemble tall weeds that loom over a monument. It’s all a tradeoff.
Read here what the Toronto Star says about the new project:
Is heaven, then, Errol Morris’s Tabloid, which I saw at my first feature screening at the Lightbox? It’s a hell of an entertainment – anything but secular Calvinism -- in its story of Joyce McKinney, the former Miss Wyoming who stalks a hulking Mormon out of love-struck obsession, and finally kidnaps him while he’s on a mission in England. She chains him to a bed for what she says ended up being a few days of rampant sex in a Devon cottage. Once she’s caught, the British tabloids feast on the torrid details, which only get better when she becomes a beau monde celebrity in London for her adventures.
It gets better when McKinney escapes from the UK in disguise, pretending to be a deaf-mute. We learn that years of bondage and discipline work in Los Angeles before the 1977 sex-and-chains gambit seem to have financed the operation. Tabloid hacks and photographers from Britain recall it all, barely cracking a smile as your jaw drops.
And McKinney resurfaces, as the grieving owner of a dead pit bull, Booger, who has him cloned in South Korea (who knew?) to produce five puppies, all named Booger. How did she finance that?
Still a bubbly blonde, with a wicked sense of irony, McKinney is the kind of subject/narrator for a doc that, if promoted right, could make this one as popular as Joan Rivers. And Morris’s exploration of the tawdry, ghoulish slant of tabloids back then makes you nostalgic for that crazy lost world before corporate journalistic sleaze gobbled it up. Will Fox, the brethren of just such an empire, release this one?
Nostalgic isn’t the word for Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, since the cave drawings that Herzog films in Chauvey-Pont-d’Arc in the Ardeche region of southern France are 30,000 years old. No one knows who the artists were or why they painted there. Herzog films it all in 3-D, which follows the undulations of the cave surfaces whose pictures of animals combine a remarkable naturalism with gestural drama. (Brace yourself for 3-D from Martin Scorsese and others soon. The ball is rolling.)
See Herzog's film, since you’ll never be allowed to enter the fragile caves. His team only got a minimal visit, which makes the film all the more extraordinary. After the screening I asked Herzog why the French government that gave him access to the caves – discovered in 1994 – didn’t require him to premiere the documentary in France. He paused and said, “They didn’t know it was finished.”
So why didn’t Client 9, Alex Gibney’s doc about Eliot Spitzer, premiere in New York instead of Toronto? (And why didn’t Robert Redford’s The Conspirator premiere at Sundance?)
Client 9 showed in New York, but the version at April's Tribeca Film Festival wasn’t a finished film, said Gibney, who interviewed Spitzer again for the version that played at TIFF.
The film takes you into the depths of high-priced prostitution, which seem civil compared to what it shows you about hammer-and-tongs politics, or about the vengeful campaign waged against Spitzer by the financial executives that he threatened to prosecute. Spitzer’s enemies weren’t determined to punish men who pay for sex. The evidence shows that they were out to get the man who sought to regulate them, or to keep their practices within the law.
When you go up as aggressively as Spitzer did against men as powerful as that, they’ll find your weakness. Bear in mind that he was popular until the scandal broke.
The 2010 Toronto International Film Festival
September 9 - 19, 2010
Various Venues
Toronto, ONT
